I have come across Flubaroo on Larry Ferlazzo’s page today. Since there are no many details on the post, I have decided to go into the details and explore the magic of Flubaroo for my classes. As I deep down the rabbit hole, I’ve seen that Flubaroo involves various useful functions that help a teacher a lot to prepare a test and grade it without any difficulty.
Where to start
- Get a gmail account
- Sign into Google docs with this account
- Click on “Create” and then “Form”
How to create a test
- Give a name to your form
- Type your question the “Question Title” part
- Choose your “question type”
- Click on “Done”
- To add a second question click on “Add item” button at the top
- Go on with the same procedure
- Finally decide on the “Layout” of the test clicking on “Theme” at the top, which is the most enjoyable part of preparing a test.
How to add a space for Student Information
- add in the questions (Text) to allow your students to write their names
- You can insert headers or page breaks on your test from the “Section Header” / “Page Break” button under “Add item”
I have created quickly this sample for you to show how it looks like after following these steps.
How to Grade the students
- Open the spreadsheet associated with the form.
- Click “Script” from the insert menu.
- Type “Flubaroo” in the box at the top, and click the Search button, and then install it.
- It appears on the spreadsheet when you have finished installing.
- Choose “Grade Assignment” and enjoy the results.
I hope this short video will help you to understand the basic functions of Flubaroo and how to use Google Docs.
I think this is an absolutely incredible tool to assign the students outside the class in different ways and grade them in a short time. It is possible to prepare reading, grammar, vocabulary and writing tests (except listening, there isn’t any function to add a podcast to the Form.) “Time” is the biggest concern for us, teachers, so such applications saving our precious time are worthful for everyone to put better use on other tasks.
Today Beykent University held a conference called “The Use of Technology in Student Centered Learning”. Even though waking up early and trying to arrive at the university on time were eventful, the conference atmosphere was enough restful to make me calm. The first plenary speaker was Nik Peachey whose session was about developing materials and practices for the digital generation. He started his talk giving some statistics on the usage of technology among teens:
More than 75 percent of teens own cell phones.
73 percent use online social networking sites
38 percent share something online that they created, such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos.
Teenagers averaged 3,339 sent and received texts a month!
When you look at the numbers, you again face the reality of digital invasion of all those applications and techy devices, and inevitably start to think how to catch up with these on going innovations. Actually, the way I found on this way is to internalize the innovations/applications at first and then use them in class without wasting time since it is a fact that digital literacy is quite damaged when it is not applied in reality.
The Pinpoints from the Nik Peachey’s Session
During his talk, Nik shared with us amazing Web applications, which can be integrated into a warmer of an activity or a follow up task outside the classroom. Here are the web tools for you, the digital bees:
TodaysMeethelps you embrace the backchannel and connect with your audience in real time. It is used for Information sharing, audience responses, democratizing the classroom, brainstorming and engagement.
Transl8it is an online SMS converter that changes long texts into a shorthand SMS language. It can also convert any SMS back to normal text. In class teachers can convert long texts into text messages and ask the students to figure out the language/genre/discourse/phonology. without paper, a record of interaction.
Text2Phonetics is an online application that transcribes small English texts into broad phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). It is really a great chance for teachers to create phonology based tasks integrating with readings.
Posterous is a simple blogging platform involving sending emails, with attachments of photos, MP3s, documents, and videos. Nik suggested using it to publish content as writing task, creating online materials and a shared private workspace, to work collaboratively with students.
Storify is an online platform to tell stories using social media such as tweets, photos, videos and the o
ther elements form the web. You can add your headline, interaction or text to create a context.
Scrible is a tool that allows you to highlight or annotate any web pages and share it with others. It is helpful for developing study skills, analyzing text (grammar and vocabulary), pinpointing text comprehension and creating different types of projects and assignments.
Evernote is a kind of software and services designed for notetaking and archiving.
Vyou is a video conference tool, which can be used to create Question and Answer Sessions by the teachers or students.
Mailvu is a video mail service allows you to save your videos. Nik suggested using this tool to develop speaking skills and increase self reflection and awareness in class.
Visual.ly is a website on which you can use many types of infographics or visual data such as timelines, flow charts, annotated maps, graphs or venn diagrams.
I think Nik’s stuff is extremely enough for a post so I’ve decided to write about Michael Swan and Işıl Boy’s sessions in another serial. I hope I could portray the details of the session reflectively enough for the ones who couldn’t attend the conference
Before starting, I would like you to ask yourself these questions.
Do you always have problems to send or upload large files (video or podcasts)?
How many hours do you spend getting some screen shots from a video?
How often do you have internet connection problem in your class?
Do you have difficulty in finding appropriate podcasts for class activities?
Last week one of my colleagues showed me a new, free program that can deal with all the diffculties mentioned in the questions above. After starting to use Free Studio Manager, I have realized that it will be really a great relief for many teachers so I decided to write about it in this post.
The first thing that you should do is to download the program to your computer. It’s totally free. After the downloading process, the following screen on which there are different categories, appears.
Youtube: When you click on Youtube, you can choose your action on the newly opened menu. It allows you not only to download a youtube video to your computer but also to convert any video to an mp3 file. Actually, what I am really interested in is the second point since I believe podcasts are instrumentally valuable in teaching students a variety of important literacy and listening skills.
MP3&Audio:If you are one of those who need to share new audio materials which are sometimes pretty heavy, with students or colleagues regularly, you need to learn how to convert them to less heavy files. To do this, Just click on Mp3 & Audio button on the main screen and choose Free Audio Converter. Drag the file from your computer into the program, decide on the quality of the track and lastly click on “Convert” button.
Photo & Images:Screen shots can be quite helpful when we need to demonstrate something that would be difficult to explain in words or create a context around a topic. Accordingly what got my attention in this program is that it allows you to get snapshots from any video as much as you want. You just need to choose the type of extraction of frames.
Hope it makes your life easier like it’s done to me. Special thanks to Mustafa.
